Born in Paris, Francis PICABIA (b. 1879, Paris – d. 1953, Paris) first made his name as a late-coming Impressionist painter in 1905. In the fall of 1912, he exhibited a group of large-scale abstractions, including The Spring and Dances at the Spring. Along with František Kupka’s Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colors and Fernand Léger’s Woman in Blue, Picabia’s canvases marked the arrival of non-objective painting in Paris. This stylistic change was the first of many abrupt reversals that would characterize his career. It also delivered his first major succès de scandale, as critics condemned the new work as “ugly” and “incomprehensible.”
While World War I raged in Europe, Picabia sought exile abroad in New York, Barcelona, and Switzerland. After the war, Picabia returned to Paris, and the Dada movement, led by Tristan Tzara, landed there soon after, inaugurating months of performances, parties, and battles in the press in an all-out assault on the culture of rationality the Dadaists held responsible for the war. Picabia made works like Tableau Rastadada, a mordant self- portrait, finding in Dada a provocative spirit that matched and extended his own.
Picabia continued to cycle through styles and experiment with unorthodox materials. Although he renounced
Dada in 1921, certain tenets of that movement persisted in his work, including the appropriation of found imagery: in one of his last stylistic phases, he copied and recombined magazine photographs into new, painted compositions, as in Portrait of a Couple. Throughout, Picabia questioned the meaning and purpose of art even as he practiced it. In 1949, Marcel Duchamp described Picabia’s career as a “kaleidoscopic series of art experiences.” Marked by a consistent inconsistency, that career continues to challenge traditional narratives of modernism.
His work is currently presented in Aprire le porte della notte at Palazzo Reale, Milan. Picabia’s work is also represented in the collections of major institutions, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Tate, London; MoMA, New York; MET, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art, amongst others.